Tips Tuesday – Avoid Theme Mistakes, Gutenberg Webinar, Blogging Stats

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• Avoid DIY Theme Mistakes – live chat with pro designer Michelle Phillips on Thursday
• A live show all about getting started with Astra themes coming soon
• Free Gutenberg webinar on July 8
• Google’s new beta report that combines Analytics and Search Console
• Some seriously eye-opening blogging stats to help you focus your next moves and priorities
• How investing in your site success can shave 2 years off not earning enough money with your blog

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Join me Live to Discuss Tips Tuesday

I hope you’ll join for tonight’s livestream at 8pm ET / 5pm PT on the BlogAid Facebook Page. It’s a great way to get the deeper story on what’s reported in Tips Tuesday. And, I almost always have breaking news for the day too. So come join us live for the party.

Replay

Who I Help

All tips, advice, and suggestions in this, and all BlogAid posts and tutorials, are intended to empower DIY site owners who are not on hosting that is restrictive in what you can and can’t do with your site and hosting setup.

BlogAid Happenings

Mark your calendars!!!

I’ve got all kinds of goodies coming up for you.

Avoid DIY Theme Mistakes – Chat with Michelle Phillps

I am really excited about this upcoming live chat with Michelle Phillips of Codefetti.

Most of you know her as the go-to person for Astra tutorials.

Well, Michelle has been a pro designer for years and works with all of the major platforms including Genesis and Divi.

She’s also on the leading edge with what’s happening in Gutenberg.

Y’all have heard me mention several times that Gutenberg and the Astra theme are a good combo, and you can design your own with it.

The problem is, most site owners only know pretty, not why themes are built the way they are.

And what we’re seeing all over the place these days, with multiple platforms, is that folks are DIYing their themes and getting into deep doo doo with:

• Speed
• ADA compliance
• Poor User Experience, which is now checked in Google’s new Core Web Vitals
• And goofing up their SEO

So, Michelle has agreed to do a couple of livestreams with me to help educate site owners on the most common theme design no-nos so you can make better decisions.

And, if you’ve never tried to do your own theme design before, you’ll hear the real story about what you’re getting into so you can decide if that’s even time well spent for you or not.

Mark your calendar for this Thursday, July 2 at 1pm ET / 10am PT and join us live on the BlogAid Facebook page.

Jump on over to the post for more details, and a link to the Facebook Event so you can get reminders about when we go live.

The replay will be available on the BlogAid Facebook page and on the post later, but you can ask your questions live during the show, while we have Michelle handy.

All About Astra Show Coming

Michelle will also be joining me for another livestream on Wed, July 15 at 1pm ET / 10am PT where we’ll take a deeper dive into getting started with Astra.

Our first show is so packed with info about theme design best practices, that I know y’all will have a ton of Astra-specific questions.

So, we’re going to devote a whole show just to Astra.

I’ll have a post for you soon with all of the details, but it will also be on the BlogAid Facebook page.

And you can go ahead and mark your calendar now.

Free Gutenberg Webinar

And, if you haven’t tried Gutenberg yet, boy are you missing out.

Join us for a free webinar on Wed, July 8 where I’ll be showing you just how powerful Gutenberg is now, plus real-world examples of what you can create with it.

And, I’ll be answering all of your Gutenberg questions right up front in my free webinar.

So, mark your calendar now for July 8 at 1pm ET / 10am PT.

This is a Zoom meeting, and you do have to register to get the Zoom meeting and replay info.

That’s all the news from around here. Let’s dive into this week’s tips.

We’re a little shy on tips and news again this week, thankfully. We like having a break.

But I do have a few important ones for you, and some eye-opening stats about blogging.

SEO Tips

Google to combine Analytics and Search Console into new beta report

Last week I received an email from Google, as did several of my DIY SEO course members, that Google has a new beta report coming out soon.

It will be called Google Search Console Insights.

It will combine Analytics data with Search Console data for your top performing posts.

Now, the reason I think everybody didn’t get this is because most folks don’t have those 2 things connected already.

I teach how to do that in my DIY SEO course.

That combo shows you a bit of Search Console data in Analytics. But it’s not a full report.

This new beta thing will be.

Google said it will roll out in a few weeks and they will send an email when it is live.

I’ll keep you posted on when it does go live, and we’ll be comparing notes about it in the course’s private Facebook group and/or having a village chat about it.

Content Marketing Tips

Eye-opening blogging stats

The nice folks over at Blogging Wizard put together a super interesting post of blogging stats.

I’d like to highlight a few for you just to give you an idea of how saturated the environment all of us are competing for eyeballs really is, plus, why it’s harder to get traction with a new blog now compared to a just a few years ago. And, I’ll talk about why you have to use different tactics as a new blogger compared to the tactics some of the course creators used for how they started their blogs.

The very first blog post was published in 1994.

There are now 600 million blogs – that’s not posts, it’s sites.

Potentially, there are 3.4 billion people currently reading those blog posts.

70 million new blog posts are published each month.

Read that one again – 70 million new posts a month. That’s some serious competition for eyeballs every day!!!!

The average blog posts is 1,236 words. Consider that when thinking about what Google considers the difference between what’s thin or authoritative content. The trend is toward longer posts, and that trend has continually gone up since 2014, which had an average word count of 808 words.

And here are 2 more stats on longer posts:

• Longer posts get more backlinks than shorter posts.
• Longer posts do better on social media – now this one is odd to me, how can anyone tell how long the post is from the little blurb that’s published on social media?

And here are some specific niche stats on that:

• The top-performing marketing blog posts were, on average, 5,714 words long.
• Travel blog posts, on the other hand, performed best when they were 4,309 words long.
• If you’re in the home and garden niche, the best performing blog posts were around 2,993 words long.

But, don’t just go for word count – make it quality content.

The number one annoyance among blog post readers is poorly written content.

A whopping 53% of site visitors will leave if images take too long to load. I don’t know how they decided that the images were the major thing to blame, as lack of lazy loading, or even full site optimization plays just as big a role in why folks leave.

Even without proper image optimization, I can usually make a site way faster to load for my site audit clients. In fact, addressing image optimization is one of the last fixes we do.

And here are 2 stats on your design, especially if it causes bad UX, or User Experience, which is what Google’s new Core Web Vitals are all about, and what Michelle and I will be discussing in our upcoming livestream:

• 90% of people have admitted to leaving a website because they thought it was “badly designed”.
• 75% of website credibility comes from the site design

So, if you’re thinking you want to DIY your own theme design, you’ll definitely want to get in the know about best practices to use. Else, you could toast yourself for visitors in a hurry.

Only 19% of bloggers spend 6 hours or more creating a post. I know most of my clients are in that 19%. I am for Heartwood Art posts, but definitely not for BlogAid, except for Tips Tuesday. My tutorial posts take that much time, especially if they have a video. But other news posts don’t. So, I’m about half and half with it on BlogAid between posts that have a huge creation timeframe and those that don’t. But all of them are big time investments on Heartwood Art.

On average, it takes 24 blog posts before you start generating traffic. So, if you’re new to this, it’s not just creating that many posts, it’s also about staggering out your promotion of them too.

The most popular and best performing posts are list types. I know some of y’all also do roundups that are very popular too. Those can be your own posts, or posts from others, or a mix. And I think this is why so many scraper folks create these, usually without any permission, and usually with stolen images.

Long headlines performed better than short ones, yet short links performed better.

Outdated plugins are the #1 way sites get hacked, so be sure to keep yours updated and be sure you are using plugins that are actively being maintained.

90,000 hack attempts happen every minute against WordPress sites.

Read that again.

Interested in a site audit to beef up your security now? 

82% of content creators believe the best way to get Google traffic is to pump out new content. The second best way is to revamp existing content. That’s something I teach in-depth in the DIY SEO course.

96% of Boomers and Gen Xers distrust bloggers and influencers.

Search engines are the #1 traffic source of top performing blogs across all niches. So, if you’re still relying on Pinterest as your main traffic source, you’re missing out big time. Get into my DIY SEO course now and get your Google traffic hopping. 

Pro bloggers share their posts an average of 8 times on social media after publishing it. You can’t do once and done anymore. And it’s not about new content. It’s about promoting what you’ve got.

Video posts are the best way to promote your blog posts on Facebook – I can definitely attest to the way higher reach that videos get on Facebook for BlogAid. And promo videos should be 3-4 minutes long on FB too.

Video posts are the best way to get reach on Twitter too.

53% of bloggers do not earn money from their blog. Honestly, I think that number is way higher as so many folks start blogging and then realize how much work it is and quit. I think the only bloggers making money are those who treat it like a business and devote the time to it.

Stop Wasting Your Time

85% of bloggers earning a full time living from their site took 4 years to get there.

So, the moral of the story is, you’re going to work a full-time job for free for a while before you can start living off your blog.

But the truth is, you can radically shorten that time and get ahead faster if you invest in your site success at the get go.

My clients said they completely wasted the first 2 years ignoring the things they learned in a site audit and in my DIY SEO course.

That’s 2 years of running on a hamster wheel and not getting the results they wanted.

Every one of my clients says the exact, same thing, “I wish I had found you sooner!”

Well, what are you waiting for with get your site and SEO and such squared away?

Too busy cranking out content?

Hmm.

Wrap Up

That’s a wrap for this week’s Tips Tuesday.

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